Sebastião Salgado does not photograph scenes; he captures entire chapters of the human condition.
He was born in the interior of Minas Gerais in 1944, surrounded by coffee plantations, red earth, and a horizon scorched by drought.
He grew up watching his father measure rainfall with a tin can and his mother pray for the cattle to survive. That harsh landscape etched itself into his memory as a first lesson in resilience. He studied economics in São Paulo and understood the numbers that shape collective suffering, but soon realized that statistics were too cold to explain the night when an entire family loses their land or the day when a child discovers there is no more water in the cistern. He married Lélia Wanick, architect and lifelong partner, and together they emigrated to Paris, escaping the military dictatorship in Brazil. It was there, at the age of thirty and with a stable job at the International Coffee Organization, that one day he picked up Lélia’s Nikon and felt that the black cylinder in his hands could translate emotions with more force than any graph.
The most important thing for me is to have my cereal. I have milk and granola and cheese. And that’s it. I have a lot of cereals that I eat all day long, and I have a big appetite. All over the planet I carry my cereals!
In 1973, Salgado left economic reports behind for good and embraced the camera. He returned to Africa, no longer as a consultant but as a novice photographer, and realized that the dust of the Sahel could tell the same story of structural poverty he had studied, only now it was told through a pair of eyes pleading for water. From that moment, he developed his method: long-term projects, total immersion, and an unshakable trust in black and white because color, he believed, distracts, while grayscale elevates gesture and texture. He joined Sygma and later Magnum, but he never subordinated his ethics to an agency’s agenda. If an assignment was brief, he extended it on his own. He could not stand the idea of stealing an image and leaving. He needed to stay, to breathe the same smoke from the firewood, to learn a few words in the local language, to sit in silence with miners as they descended into shafts smelling of mud and hope.
In the mid-1980s, he published Other Americas, a seven-year journey through rural communities and Indigenous peoples in Latin America. The images reveal hands shaped by machetes, faces carved by the Andean wind, and a near-mystical faith in the land. There is no exoticism, only complicity. Salgado brings us so close that we can feel the roughness of the poncho and the crunch of dry soil underfoot. Each frame operates as a reminder that identity is a matter of light and skin, not of borders drawn on maps.
His rise to international recognition came with Workers in 1993. Salgado traveled through the coal mines of Dalian, the shipyards of Gdańsk, the sugar fields of Cuba, and the oil rigs of Kuwait. He photographed men and women soaked in sweat, soot, and metal, raising the structures that hold the global economy while they themselves remained invisible in the ledgers. The series does not glorify labor; it dignifies it. Each portrait feels sculpted from granite. There is an epic air that, far from romanticizing hardship, underlines the human capacity to transform the environment at the cost of their own health. When the exhibition opened in Paris, many corporate executives left stunned because they recognized the products they sold but had never seen the faces of those who made them.
Then came Exodus, a cartography of modern displacement. Salgado spent six years following the trails left by fear, the kind that forces people to leave everything behind. Rwandan refugees walking among corpses and tattered plastic, Bosnian families crossing snowy valleys, Latin Americans sleeping under bridges along the US border. In these images, the serenity of composition contrasts with the chaos of context. The horizon often appears low, as if the camera is asking the sky for permission to give the protagonists a breath. The epic is not in the fire or the blood; it is in the stubborn gaze that seeks a place to begin again. For Salgado, photography is an act of listening. Each shot is preceded by hours of conversation or shared silence. This is why his subjects do not feel observed; they feel accompanied.
After telling the story of escape, he felt the need to narrate hope. Lélia, his editor and ethical compass, pushed him to recover the Atlantic forest surrounding the family farm in Aimorés, devastated by cattle grazing and logging. This gave birth to Instituto Terra, a reforestation project that has planted more than three million trees and transformed an arid valley into a laboratory of biodiversity. That personal experience inspired Genesis, a journey through places where human presence blends with natural balance. Glaciers in Patagonia, tribes in Papua New Guinea, marine iguanas in the Galápagos, deserts in Namibia that resemble abstract paintings. Here the human scale is minimal, almost reverent, against landscapes that existed long before collective memory. Genesis is a hymn to the possibility of reconciliation between technology and ecosystems, a warning that time is running out but also a testament that regeneration is possible.
All his work is anchored in deep black and white, with dense blacks that absorb and whites that breathe. He uses small apertures to capture detail in every wrinkle and fast enough shutter speeds to freeze sparks of coal in midair. His Hasselblad is an extension of his spine, and his medium-format negatives give prints a grain so fine it feels like velvet on a museum wall. No digital filter can replace that raw material. His processing seeks the richest tonal range so that the viewer can travel from the darkness of a mining tunnel to the milky light enveloping Arctic nomads.
So many times I’ve photographed stories that show the degradation of the planet. I had one idea to go and photograph the factories that were polluting, and to see all the deposits of garbage. But, in the end, I thought the only way to give us an incentive, to bring hope, is to show the pictures of the pristine planet – to see the innocence.
Salgado has received awards on every continent, but he insists that the true reward is using fame to amplify causes. He speaks slowly, with a soft Brazilian accent that becomes gentler when he recalls the laughter of a refugee child or the song of the macaws that have returned to Instituto Terra. He says the camera must never humiliate. When a face hardens, he lowers the viewfinder and waits. He respects the subject’s sovereignty over their own image, convinced that dignity allows no shortcuts. In interviews, he often repeats that beauty is not decorative; it is strategic. It attracts the gaze, and once it is held, it introduces the uncomfortable question: why does this suffering exist, and why does inequality persist?
His ethics have inspired generations of photojournalists and documentarians. Young reporters come to his workshops eager to learn technique but leave with a lesson in patience and humanity. Salgado reminds them that rushing kills empathy. He advises always carrying a notebook to record names and promises. Return if possible, and send printed copies to those who posed. Commitment is measured in returns, not in scoops.
His connection to cinema is also part of his legacy. Wim Wenders and his son, Juliano Ribeiro, directed The Salt of the Earth, an intimate portrait that shows both the fatigue of a man who has seen too many exiles and his renewed energy while planting trees. On screen, we see him studying contact sheets with a magnifying glass and whispering exposure calculations almost from memory, like someone reciting a technical prayer. The film reveals the fragility behind the myth and confirms that visual epic arises from shared and accepted vulnerability.
Today, Salgado travels less, but he has not stopped. He is planning a project on the Amazon that will combine photography, science, and environmental education. In the meantime, he spends entire mornings reviewing archives and selecting negatives that have never been publicly shown. He says each roll stored away is like a seed waiting for the right conditions to germinate. Whether it is a portrait of a miner from Serra Pelada or the shadow of an elephant in Botswana, he believes every image has its own season to speak to the world.
To walk through one of his exhibitions is to enter a cathedral of silvers and shadows. Movement slows, voices drop, and even breathing seems audible. Before the monumental prints, the visitor is surrounded by the gaze of strangers who seem to ask what they will do with the knowledge they have just acquired. The word humanist is often drained of meaning in empty speeches, but in Salgado’s case, it regains its weight. It does not just describe a photographer who loves people; it describes a citizen who uses his art to build a bridge between the privilege of observation and the urgency of action.
The problem is, we live in a society where all that interests us is power and money. So we don’t have any interest in our children, and what we leave for our children is not important.
That bridge can be walked both ways. The viewer who contemplates the garimpeiros climbing the mud trench with sacks of stone can no longer pretend that gold is just a shiny metal. They are marked by awareness, and for Salgado, that is the first step toward change. His humanist tales function as both mirrors and windows. They let us see the other and, at the same time, recognize ourselves. They remind us that the scar of exile, the glint of sweat on the skin, and the song of a reborn forest are all part of a collective story, one that is still being written and one that each of us, with our small share of responsibility, can help guide toward a more just and breathable future.
